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Liquid Mind

17 February 2013

Time flies. Nearly a month has passed since I’ve last written here. My trusty laptop which has carried me unfailingly through the intense years of a senior undergraduate career littered with programming, spreadsheets and writing is now grumbling during weekend jaunts to literary haunts in the District. Even after a complete wipe it remains less than its normal cheery self. The search begins for a worthy steed to carry me into the next decade.

My last CPA exam has been passed and I am now in the process of completing final licensing paperworks. As part of the Jeremy 2.1 initiative I’ve signed up for an assortment of interesting events from caving, hiking and mountain biking to tech startup groups and weedy IT-related stuff. My extra-occupational calendar is bursting at the seams. Several of these have already gone down as successes. It’s wonderful to have evenings and weekends available for activities other than getting buried in dry CPA material.

Yesterday morning I toured Eastern Market with a friend and awarded it Jeremy’s favorite-neighborhood-that-is-realistic award. In case you’re wondering, Georgetown still holds the Jeremy’s favorite, but alas, it also flies the if-you-need-to-ask-you-can’t-afford-it-here flag. Eastern Market is within an easy morning jog of the Capitol and the surrounding monuments, has a great neighborly atmosphere, and has good parking and good subway access. Most importantly, though, it has that unassuming breathtaking feeling that comes from living in the shadow of the Capitol dome (look up, isn’t that awesome?) and all the other perks that come with living in a condo on Capitol Hill. Wow that sounded dreamy.

Yesterday afternoon I stopped in at a food bank – which decidedly is not in a good neighborhood – to meet a coordinator for planning a spring gardening event. The meeting went well and I ended up working the front desk for the afternoon – checking in volunteers, filling out community service forms, and answering the phone – not at all what I had in mind. You know those 2″ plexiglass barriers at check cashing counters in rough neighborhoods that come crashing down if anyone gets testy? I didn’t need to use them.

Today was spent reading email, writing email, and catching up on a hundred little things that need to get done but aren’t important enough for their own chunk of time. I loaded a backpack with cranky laptop, Kindle, a notebook, two other books, and boarded the train for Farragut West. The streets were bitterly cold which wasn’t a problem since I was holed up in a Dupont Circle Cosi for the better part of the day. I made progress in a book, wrote the emails, did a hundred other little tasks, and wrote this blog post. Booyah.

The book I nearly finished today is “Several short sentences about writing” by Verlyn Klinkenborg. It’s pretentious and idealistic – kind of like me – but I enjoyed it nonetheless. It’s also a fairly short book, and one you could read while blocking an aisle in Barnes and Noble. You might want to buy it, though, because to really absorb the short sentences you will want to be sitting down. This isn’t a good book for e-readers, either, as the form of the lines are important here. It’s one of those books that will send the reader off in for/while loops – to invoke programmer jargon – meaning you may find yourself gazing at the ceiling thinking completely unrelated thoughts, forgetting the line that sent you heavenward and losing track of time altogether, and then you will take up reading again. Not an unpleasant feeling.